Vengeful Seduction

CHAPTER ONE

WHITE was a dreadful colour. Isobel stared at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror and thought that she would probably never wear it again. It would forever conjure up a feeling of despair.

She began brushing her hair, long dark hair, almost black, which fell down her back in small waves. Sooner or later, she knew, she would have to stop brushing it. She had been up here in her bedroom for well over two hours now, getting dressed, but in reality dodging the inevitable which would be progressing now downstairs.

There was a knock on the door and her mother pushed it open and came inside, smiling. Isobel smiled back. The muscles in her jaw ached from the effort but she had no choice. Brides were supposed to be radiant. It was their hallmark. Whoever heard of a depressed bride?

‘I’m nearly ready,’ Isobel said, turning around and hearing the rustle of her dress under her. The sleeves felt too tight, restricting almost, and the neckline was too low, but then she had only herself to blame. Her input in choosing the thing had been next to nil. She had allowed her mother to pick the design from a magazine without even glancing at it. It had a top fitted to the waist, from where it fell in a series of chiffon layers down to her calves. She had been measured for it, had tried it on, had nodded at her mother and the seamstress, and she had hardly seen it at all.

Now she realised that she hated it, but then, she thought, she would have hated any bridal dress.

‘How do I look?’ she asked, standing up, and her mother’s smile broadened.

‘A picture, darling,’ her mother said, with a sheen in her eyes, and Isobel said quickly, firmly,

‘No tears—you promised.’ Cry, she thought, and I shall burst into tears, and as well as being a depressed bride I shall end up being a depressed bride with mascara streaming down my face. Not an attractive sight.

‘But where has my little girl gone?’ Mrs Chandler held her daughter’s hands and Isobel looked back at her with great love and a growing lump in her throat.

‘I’m still here, Mum,’ she said. ‘You’re not losing a daughter; you’re gaining a son.’ That took quite a bit of doing, and saying it made her feel ever so slightly sick.

‘Of course I am, darling,’ Mrs Chandler agreed, ‘but your dad and I…well…Where have all the years gone? One minute you’re a toddler, and now here you are getting married.’

‘I had to grow up some time.’ It was important to keep her voice light, carefree. It wouldn’t do at all to have her parents suspect, even for a moment, that all was not well in Bride City. They would immediately start asking questions, and Isobel couldn’t afford for that to happen. She loved them both far too much. She had been the much longed for and only child of a couple who had given up hope of ever having children, and from the day of her birth she had been showered with parental adoration. They had both taken an inordinate delight in everything she had done, said, thought, and Isobel had returned their joy with the same deep love.

‘And how do I look?’ Mrs Chandler gave a small twirl and Isobel grinned broadly.

‘Spectacular.’ She did, too. Mrs Chandler was as tall as her daughter was, but fair where Isobel was dark, although they both had the same shade of violet-blue eyes and the same long, thick eyelashes. She was sixty now, but her face was still beautiful, with that amazing bone-structure and that clear, faultless complexion. Parkinson’s disease might have tainted her movements, slowed her speech, but it had not diminished her lustre.

‘Dad’s a lucky man,’ Isobel said, and when she thought of her father she had another one of those awful lumps in the back of her throat again.

Mrs Chandler laughed. ‘If you could have seen him an hour ago,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t have described him as a man toppling over under the weight of his good luck. He was scowling rather heavily and trying to squeeze into a dinner-jacket. He insisted that he could still get into the one he wore when we married, and of course he can’t. The odd button at the bottom will have to be left undone, but I don’t think anyone will notice, do you? All eyes will be on you today, my darling.’

That made Isobel feel almost as sick as she had felt when she had told her mother about not losing a daughter but gaining a son, but she smiled again and tried to look terribly radiant at the thought of that.

‘How are the preparations going?’ she asked, changing the subject. ‘I’m sorry, I should have been helping, but…’

‘But nothing. You can’t be scurrying around a marquee in your gown, making sure that everything is all right! I know you’re nervous—I was awfully nervous on my wedding-day—but there are enough hands downstairs making sure that nothing goes horribly wrong. The caterers have been wonderful, the food looks delicious and the guests have now started trickling in. Your father’s holding the fort with Aunt Emma and your cousins. Telling his usual jokes. You know.’ She was smiling, her eyes distant and full of affection.

The perfect family unit, Isobel thought. Except nothing was perfect, was it? As she had discovered to her cost.

‘Has Jeremy arrived yet?’ The question almost strangled her, but she kept right on smiling and looking happy.

‘Due shortly.’ Mrs Chandler started moving towards the door slowly. ‘Darling, I shall have to go and help your father. He’ll come and fetch you in a short while, when everything’s about to start.’ She paused by the door. ‘I’m so happy for you, my dear. I know we both said——’ she spoke carefully, seriously ‘—that we were a little disappointed that you didn’t finish your university education, but I’m sure, seeing you now, that it’s all for the best, and you knew what you were doing.’

She left and Isobel sat on the bed. Now that there was no one in the room, she felt free to stop smiling. She wished that her mother had not brought up the subject of university. She had had to swallow many bitter pills for this marriage, and that had been one of them.

She sighed, and across the room her eyes caught her image looking back at her from the full-length antique pine mirror in the corner of the room. Never mind the years slipping past; that didn’t worry her. What worried her was the prospect of the future hurtling towards her.

She slipped on her high, satin shoes. They felt uncomfortable. She was a tall girl and accustomed to wearing flat shoes, but this dress needed high ones. They completed the image, and there was no doubt that the image was a remarkably beautiful one.

Her mother had once told her, rather proudly, that she had been striking even as a baby, and Isobel had never had any reason to doubt that. She only had to look in the nearest mirror to see that those striking looks had never abandoned her.

Her waist-long hair was like finely spun silk, black silk; her skin was ivory-white and her features were perfect. From a very young child she had known admiration, and over the years she had become accustomed to it, even though she felt that her beauty had been a blessing, but in the end it was an irrelevance. Beauty, after all, was transitory, and sometimes, quite frankly, it could be a terrific disadvantage. It opened doors, but the reception waiting at the other end was not always the one you had hoped for.

She walked across to the window and stared down into the huge back garden which her parents had diligently cultivated ever since they had moved into the house. In a few years’ time they would have to get a gardener to help them out, or else convert some of the land into pasture, if that were possible, but of course they would defer that until the last possible moment. Her mother had been told at the onset of her illness that her condition would worsen, but Isobel knew that she would continue to tend her garden, lovingly if not as thoroughly.

From here she couldn’t see the arriving guests. They would be entering through the front door. Relatives, some of whom she had not seen for a long time; her university friends, who would probably gape and feel dwarfed by the dimensions of her parents’ house, because she had never let on just how wealthy her background was; and of course schoolfriends, hers and Jeremy’s, shared friends whom they had known from the year dot—just as they had known each other from the year dot.

She gazed down into the garden and attempted to speculate on their reactions to this marriage. Most, she supposed, would see it as a sort of natural conclusion, something expected, but some, her closest friends, had already expressed their horror at the match. She had always been the high achiever, the girl with everything, and they had told her, with varying degrees of tact, just how amazed they were that she was throwing it all away, throwing away a medical degree, for God’s sake, to settle down and get married. Naturally she had said nothing. How could she?

Her parents had been disappointed as well, even though they had taken great pains not to condemn her choice. The fact was that they had instilled in her from day one the importance of education, and they had been bewildered when she had arrived home six months previously, sat them down and tonelessly announced her decision to marry Jeremy Baker.

Their immediate concern was that she was pregnant, which, Isobel had thought at the time, had been the only amusing thing about the whole sorry affair.

‘It’s just that it’s all so sudden, darling,’ her mother had said, frowning and trying to make sense of the impossible. ‘I didn’t even think that you and Jeremy were that close. I thought…’

Isobel had known what she had thought, and she had cut in hurriedly, with some nonsense about deciding at last where her heart lay.

‘But can’t it wait?’ her father had asked in a concerned voice, and she hadn’t been able to meet his eyes.

‘We feel that this is the best way for us,’ she had mumbled, and later, when they had gently asked her about her medical degree, she had fudged and muttered something about blood and guts not really being up her street after all.

In the end, they had left it, and her mother had embarked on the wedding preparations with zeal.

Her father was an influential man in the community and strings had been pulled so that everything fell into place with the perfection of an event that could have taken years in the making. Nothing was too small or too great for their daughter, and from the sidelines Isobel had watched and choked back the sickening misery that had threatened to overwhelm her at every turn.

She was consulted on the design for the wedding-invitations, the serviettes, the colours of the flowers which hung in profusion downstairs in the marquee, every conceivable shade of yellow because, her mother had decided, spring was yellow and so the flowers would all represent spring. Frankly, winter would have been more appropriate but she had bitten back the caustic observation and gone along with the general flow.

She began pacing about the room, glancing at the reminders of her childhood which still clung here and there: adventure books which she had devoured in her youth, before biology texts became much more fascinating, a doll which she could remember being given to her as a birthday present from her parents when she was five, a picture of her family which she had done when she was four and which her parents had proudly framed—three figures with odd shapes and stick-like fingers. Her parents had been immensely proud of that picture, but in fact art had been just about the only thing that had eluded her. She had a mind more attuned to the logical.

Ironic, she thought now, that her life, which had been cheerfully pacing towards the most logical conclusion in the world—a degree in the subject she had adored, a career helping people—had petered out into the most irrational ending.

That made her think of Jeremy, and she swallowed down the bitter resentment rising up her throat.

In less than one hour’s time she would be his wife, and there was little point in constantly whipping herself with the insanity of it when there was nothing she could possibly do to remedy the situation.

She heard another knock on the door and stiffened in alarm. Surely not her father. Surely not yet. She looked at her watch, which showed that she still had at least forty-five minutes left of freedom, and said, ‘Yes? Come in!’

If was probably her mother with some detail that needed sorting out, or eIse Abigail, the least tactful but closest of her childhood friends, who would no doubt launch into another lecture on the stupidity of the marriage.

‘Fine,’ she had said when Isobel had told her about Jeremy. ‘Throw your life away on that worm! Throw away your hopes of being a doctor! And while you’re about it, why don’t you fling yourself under the nearest bus as well?’ Abigail was studying drama and had cultivated a theatrical way of talking. ‘I shall never mention another syllable on the subject again!’ But she had continued to expound on the theme whenever they had met, and Isobel assumed that she was about to recommence.

It wasn’t Abigail. It wasn’t her mother. It was the last person in the world she wanted to face, but face him she did, defiantly across the length of the room.

‘So,’ he said, strolling into the room and shutting the door behind him, ‘the bride is ready.’ His voice was sneering, his expression hard and contemptuous.

‘What are you doing here?’ Isobel asked. Her heart was beating quickly, making her feel giddy and deprived of air. He had always had this sort of dramatic effect on her, as if his presence threw her system into some weird kind of overdrive.

‘Didn’t you think that I’d turn up?’ Lorenzo smiled humourlessly. ‘Why, Isobel, my dearest, I’m the best man.’

‘Yes.’ She licked her dry lips. ‘But you should be downstairs, with everyone else.’

What she really meant was that he should be anywhere else, but not here, not in her room. She couldn’t bear this game of cruelty he had played ever since he had found out about Jeremy, even though she could understand it.

‘I never thought you’d do it,’ he bit out, advancing towards her. ‘When you told me five months ago what you were planning, I thought that it was a joke, some kind of mad joke.’

‘No joke, Lorenzo.’

His hands shot out, grasping her arms, and she winced in pain.

‘Why? Why, damn you!’

‘I told you…’

‘You told me nothing!’ He flung her away and walked towards the dressing-table, resting on it with clenched fists.

Isobel followed him, stared at his back, the downbent head, and struggled not to put her arms around him.

Presently he turned around and faced her, his face dark and savage.

‘Why are you doing this, Isobel?